Suppose you came to me with that eternal question,
"How do I gain fame and riches in this world with a
minimum of talent and effort?" It’s an issue I can
relate to, and I’d be eager to share my cynic’s wisdom
with you.
In the past I might have advised you to land a supporting
role in a network sitcom. You don’t need major-league
looks or talent to be a first-rate second banana.
Essentially you need to be a lovable nuisance. I’ve known
several colleagues at work who would have made excellent
supporting stars in network sitcoms, if only they had chosen
the right field. But now I’m convinced I’ve found a
profession that offers even greater rewards for the
ambitious slacker. I have one word for you, and it’s a
short one: ART.
A few centuries ago you actually needed a modicum of
talent to succeed as an artist. You labored long and hard,
serving your apprenticeship at the side of a master,
fumbling with your own insufficiencies, perfecting your
technique, reaching into the deepest pockets of your soul so
you could create something for the public (and even
posterity) to admire. It might have taken you half a
lifetime to learn how to paint a masterly portrait or even a
credible bowl of oranges.
But that was then. In our time you can display an ACTUAL
bowl of oranges, give it some obscurely ironic and faintly
provocative title like "Dead Fruit Messiah #3" and
wait for the applause. You’ll be written up in the art
magazines, feted by gallery owners and lionized by all the
usual cognoscenti who claim to know when the emperor is
wearing spiffy new clothes. And you’ll have done it
without ever needing to buy yourself a paintbrush and
palette.
Take young British artist Martin Creed, for example. (The
British seem to have cornered the market on outrageous art
lately, with Chris Offili and his dung-smeared Virgin,
Damien Hirst and his rotting cow head, and that naughty
Tracey Emin, who caused a row by displaying her dirty sheets
and panties. The fact that I know all their names tells me
that these artists are succeeding much too well.) Martin
Creed is what you might call a maximum minimalist. He won
attention not long ago for exhibiting a crumpled piece of
paper in a box. Now he’s won the prestigious Turner Prize,
awarded to British artists under the age of fifty, for
displaying what is essentially an empty room with the
lighting fixtures rigged to go on and off every five seconds
or so. He dubbed his masterpiece "Work #227: the lights
going on and off."
The judges praised Creed’s winning entry for its
"strength, rigor, wit and sensitivity to the
site." A curator at the Tate Museum explained Creed’s
creed: "He wants to make art where he is doing as
little as possible that is consistent with doing
something." Creed, who accepted his award from Madonna
on British prime-time TV, has said that he likes his empty
room because "it’s a really big work with nothing
being there."
All right. So the man believes that nothing is something.
At least he isn’t assaulting our senses with photographs
of his own sexual climaxes, as the notorious art-world
provocateur Andres Serrano has done. (Serrano is best known
for his "Piss Christ," a photo of a crucifix
submerged in the artist’s urine.) And their offenses seem
trivial next to those of a San Francisco art student who,
according to an article by Karl Zinsmeister in The
American Enterprise, "recently satisfied one of his
course requirements by blindfolding and gagging a volunteer,
having sex with him, defecating, then giving and receiving
an enema, all on an open-air stage in the company of other
class members, two professors, and passersby." When the
traumatized volunteer later complained about his public
ordeal, the young "artist" indignantly hissed,
"I’m just shocked and appalled that you can’t do
certain things in art school." He explained that his
work was "an exploration of the notion of the
master-slave dialectic in Hegel." Of course it was. How
obtuse of us to have missed the point.
We shouldn’t be surprised that evil might lurk in the
hallways of an art school. If we look hard enough, we can
find it in cherry-paneled corporate boardrooms, church
pulpits and grade-school playgrounds, too. We shouldn’t be
shocked that certain perpetually pimpled adolescent souls
want to keep pushing the envelope, to see just how many
spitballs they can fling at the teacher without getting
themselves expelled.
What’s surprising is not that so many artists have been
flinging such copious quantities of spitballs for so many
years, but that the "teachers" have been REWARDING
them with straight A’s instead of keeping them for
detention. The spitball-artists have been at it since that
rascal Marcel Duchamp put a urinal on display as a work of
art back around World War I. And the prevailing potentates
of the art world -- the critics, the professors, the
impressionable patrons -- have been mysteriously,
suspiciously ecstatic.
My theory is that empty, ugly or indecipherable art makes
the critics feel indispensable in their role as
interpreters. No wonder they rhapsodize: they alone have the
power confer meaning upon the meaningless. If a gallery were
to display an open can of Spam as part of an exhibition, you
can be sure that some earnest scholar would extol it as
"a seminal work in the redefinition of visual and
olfactory space, altering forever the parameters of the
senses with regard to the formal relationship of the
container and the contained." The critic would delight
in the textural contrast of organic meat product with
inorganic tin, would praise the artist’s sociopolitical
awareness of Spam as proletarian nourishment, would quiver
with delight at the ironic kitschiness of the concept. I
wonder how the critic would respond if someone pointed out
that the can was left there by a careless guard during his
lunch hour.
Why bother to make an original contribution? Why not just
put a reproduction of the Mona Lisa on display under your
own name? The critics would gush over your "bold
repudiation of the rigid patriarchalism of proprietary
creativity." Why should only a genius reserve the right
to lay claim to a work of art? The fact that he created it
is irrelevant; you’ve been resourceful enough to stake
your own claim.
There seems to be no end to meaningless and repulsive
art. What should have been a mere transient ripple in the
history of art -- a temporary bout of hiccups, a touch of
giddy irreverence following centuries of unrelieved
greatness -- has turned into a mindlessly destructive tidal
wave. Since the days of Duchamp, the spitball-artists have
given us empty canvases as well as empty rooms (Creed’s
"Work #227: the lights going on and off" was
hardly the first). They’ve presented us with examples of
excrement and other bodily effluvia (all meticulously
catalogued, no doubt), as well as severed human torsos and
other rotting carcasses full of slithering maggots, as if
art should be measured exclusively by its ability to
disgust. All right, we’re disgusted. Can we go home now?
It would be easy to write off these sorry examples of
cultural sputum as the brainchildren of half-demented and
overhyped performance artists. What boggles the mind is that
collectors are actually BUYING it. Someone paid $29,500 for
a dead ladybug in a styrofoam cup, ingeniously titled
"Untitled." (If I’m going to pay $29,500 for a
work of art, the artist had better damn well take the time
to come up with a title.) But that hefty sum is nothing
compared to the $330,000 -- that’s
three-hundred-and-thirty thousand honest-to-God greenbacks,
not Monopoly money -- that some deluded soul paid for a
full-size rubber-and-foam mattress created by one Rachel
Whiteread. Did nobody tell the patron that for $330,000 you
can buy an entire HOUSE with a lawn, a fireplace, a Jacuzzi
and SEVERAL mattresses? I can imagine the kind of home Ms.
Whiteread bought with the proceeds.
Are you beginning to see why I’d advise ambitious young
slackers to take up a career in art? Think of the
possibilities: instead of selling your old video cassettes
for pennies on the dollar at a garage sale, just stack them
up in a fashionable gallery and give them a sexy title like
"Obsolete Media #19." You’ll probably reap
enough to fill your entire apartment with DVDs, and future
college students might be gawking at your work in a
twenty-second century edition of Janson’s History of
Art.
The art-consumer crowd has become the emperor of Hans
Christian Andersen’s famous tale; the avant-garde
minimalists and shockmeisters are the tailor. Of course,
only the most refined and discerning souls can appreciate
these gossamer garments, and therein lies the lure of such
highly touted non-art -- especially for upper-bourgeois
patrons who want to be seen wearing the best. The problem is
that the garments are a sham, a hoax, a great NOTHING
invested by critics and gallery owners (not to mention the
artists themselves) with layers of bogus meaning. I want to
cry out in exasperation to these precious tricksters,
"All right, we get it... anything you display in a
gallery setting becomes art. And if everything is art, then
nothing is art. Very profound, this existential conundrum.
Now let’s see if you can paint a decent landscape."
If the avant-garde fraternity really wanted to shock us,
they’d paint that landscape.
A dead ladybug in a styrofoam cup qualifies as a work of
art only because somebody had the audacity to place it in a
gallery. Take it out of the gallery setting, strip it of its
distinctive title ("Untitled"), and it’s just a
dead insect in a cup. If you inadvertently tossed it into
the fireplace during a party, you could recreate the piece
yourself within forty-five seconds -- assuming you had a
dead ladybug handy. Real art generally can’t be recreated
by just anyone -- even by the original artist. On the other
hand, anyone can replicate a crumpled piece of paper, a
soiled bed, an empty room. You need more than a concept to
create art; you need artistry.
I was pleased to read that a cleaning person at a London
gallery recently dumped a pile of beer bottles, coffee cups
and ashtrays into the garbage. He had assumed, naturally,
that he was disposing of rubbish. It turned out that he had
actually tossed an artwork by that trendiest of the trendy,
he of the rotting cow heads and maggots, British
shock-artist Damien Hirst. The work was expected to fetch a
six-figure sum, and the folks at the gallery sweated to
recreate it from photographs.
Was Hirst upset that his work was mistaken for rubbish?
No, the reports say he just laughed.
